Here's That Huge New Rupert Murdoch Profile Everyone's Talking About

Basically, at 79, Murdoch's still going strong, reinvigorated by
a new crusade to kill the arrogant "elite" at the New York
Times. And Google.

Meanwhile, "reclusive" son James is quietly working on taking
control...

On Saturday, January 9, Rupert Murdoch
was on his Boeing 737 returning to New York from a business trip
to Los Angeles when he learned that the New York Times
had just posted a long profile of Fox News chief Roger Ailes on
its website, one that he knew was going to cause a giant
headache.

Earlier that morning, Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, the
London PR executive who’s married to his daughter Elisabeth, had
sent an e-mail to Murdoch’s BlackBerry (Murdoch only recently
began using e-mail himself). “I’ve given a quote to the New York
Times, and you’re probably not going to like it,” Freud
wrote.

The quote lived up to its advance billing—and quite a bit more.
“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being
ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained
disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation,
its founder and every other global media business aspires to,”
Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund, had told the paper.
Certainly there was personal animus in the remark; in the
left-of-center London social circles where Freud and Elisabeth
operated, Fox is particularly loathed.

But the quote was also a salvo in a battle that had been raging
around Murdoch for years. Is Fox News a disreputable cash cow,
its reported $700 million in profit something to be tolerated
with a held nose? Or is it central to the News Corp. mission? And
questions like these lead directly to others: Who is Rupert
Murdoch, really? And what does he want now?